Welcome to Missing Comma, a bi-weekly look at anarchy in the news. It would be remiss of us to bring Missing Comma back in the current age without talking about the “fake news” scandal – specifically, how fake it is as a scandal. For those who have somehow missed the last month of legacy media content, the…

Dear Supporters, June has come and gone, and with it, we’ve got another Media Coordinator Report to deliver. Here are the numbers: 27,770 submissions 10 pickups…? I have to admit, folks. Finding pickups is the hardest part of this job and I have been doing it all wrong. The reason this report is so late,…

Dear Supporters, May has come and gone, and with it, we’ve got another Media Coordinator Report to deliver. Here are the numbers: 15,529 submissions 6 pickups If you didn’t catch my mid-month update, I laid out the submission and pickup process there. Now, last month I said I fully expected to be back up to…

Dear C4SS Supporters, This is a new feature designed to keep you up-to-date with what we’re up to here at C4SS. This report will not be as in-depth as the monthly report, but it will feature some key numbers such as: number of pickups, and number of submissions to date. It’ll also function as sort…

Dear C4SS supporters, Welcome to my first media coordinator report. April was a month of experimentation (also known as a month of me falling flat on my face 99 times before figuring out how to ride this bike on the last try) with regard to our email submissions system; as such, the number of submitted…

Welcome to Missing Comma, the new, official C4SS Media Coordinator blog. Thomas Knapp stepped down as Media Coordinator for the Center for a Stateless Society last week, leaving the job to me. He has been a force to be reckoned with here for the past five years, and his work has taken the Center from…

This morning, there are twelve people who are dead who should not be. Nine journalists, a maintenance worker and two police officers were killed at the Paris headquarters of French satire newspaper Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday. Eleven more were injured; four are still in critical condition as of this writing. Here is a list of the…

Welcome to 2015! This is Missing Comma, a media criticism and analysis blog project graciously hosted by the Center for a Stateless Society. As with last year, our continuing mission is to understand how various forms of informational media – mainly the news – interact with individuals, and vice versa. Our goal: lay down the…

Hi everyone! This will be the last Missing Comma post of 2014. I’m pushing a lot of things back so that I can get my backlog of op-eds – which I’ve had since last September – out of the way. Once I’m done with those commentaries, however, I’m making Missing Comma my top priority. 2015…

It’s been about two weeks since Gamergate came to a head and I’m still trying to sort out all that happened. Lots of what I saw and read (and a lot of what people told me in conversation) suggest situations worth exploring in greater detail, and when I am able, I’ll do that here. These…

It is occasionally, when I’m not having to defend colleagues from “anti-PC” crusaders terrified that they’re losing “muh libertarianism” or when I’m not writing joke articles making fun of Mark Ames, the mission of this blog series to engage in media criticism. Truth be told, there’s a lot to criticize about the media these days….

Cathy Reisenwitz announced last week that she was quitting full-time libertarian commentary to pursue a career in sales. She wrote in her blog post announcing this move that, “I want to learn to connect better. And getting successful at sales will require humility and constant feedback, and self-improvement is so incredibly important to building a…

I’ll be honest, I used to scoff at the term “citizen journalism.” Why should any average Joe with a Twitter account be trusted with the same line of work for which I’m working on a bachelor’s degree? But in recent years, with the introduction of GoPros, smartphones and accessible encryption techniques, a new kind of vigilante…

Last night I published a dumb joke that also served as a semi-congratulations to C4SS’s media coordinator, Thomas L. Knapp, for getting published in Alternet. It was not a well-crafted joke, and as indicated by some of your confused reactions in the comments section, it was much too inside-baseball to work, especially given the low…

This week, popular liberal-progressive news aggregator Alternet published an article by one Thomas Knapp, a former Libertarian Party campaign manager, on Google’s descent into surveillance state madness. While the article had plenty of legitimate points of concern regarding Google’s behavior, and pointed out, quite rightly, that all citizens are considered to be criminals by the State,…

If you’ve ever doubted that journalism is a powerful tool for undermining the state, first off, you’ve probably not been following the NSA leaks and second, this week US government officials shook in their boots so hard over some new leaks that they spoiled the Associated Press’s scoop on them. This is hardly a new practice, but I…

A week ago, we put a call out on Twitter and Facebook, as well as here at the blog, to gauge reactions to a prospective comment policy change that included “safe spaces” language. A couple of prominent figures, as well as ordinary readers, took the time to respond. On Facebook, Sharon Presley from the Association…

Hi, everyone! I’m back from vacation about two weeks later than I expected, but I’m ready to start writing again. Juliana’s at a FEE seminar this week, but she’s still going to be writing regularly here at Missing Comma. This week, we’re taking a break from our 24/7 coverage of Anthony Cumia (kidding) to ask…

Last week, I talked about Sirius XM’s decision to fire shock jock Anthony Cumia. Along with the other Sirius XM listeners who hadn’t cancelled their subscription over this, I anxiously waited for Monday’s O&A show, which featured a dejected-sounding Opie and Jim not only lamenting their co-host’s firing, but the predictable fan and media reaction. According…

Sirius XM celebrated Independence Day this year by giving Anthony Cumia, one half of shock jock team Opie and Anthony, the boot. Anthony had tweeted one of his racist rants about a black woman who punched him in the face in Times Square when she thought he was taking a picture of her. Social media is pretty…